A really busy January is over

I can't believe that it has been more than one month since I last wrote something in my blog... it seems that my work absorbs most of my productive time and many of the things that I would blog about are already posted in the Agro-Know blog anyway (by me).

Well, January is officially over and there were a lot of work-related updates: First of all, there is a new team member in the Marketing team (that I am leading - or at least I try to); Alexandros seems like a talented and creative person that is currently doing his internship in Agro-Know, helping me out with marketing-related activities, such as the social media and the marketing material (which needs a face lift, I have to admit). It is a challenge for me to guide him through the team's needs and provide him with the knowledge and space that he needs in order to deploy his creativity and fresh ideas!

Apart from that, I have been focusing my work during January on the branding- and marketing-related activities of a new product that Agro-Know plans to deploy in the next weeks/months. These activities include:

• the work on the product's logo with George, a talented, external (out of the Agro-Know team) graphic designer;
• the development of a Drupal-based landing page for the product with the help of an external team of web developer;
• the work related to the registration of the trademark of the new product (name and logo), in collaboration with the company's lawyer (Periklis, also a great guy);
• the development of a methodology based on the AARRR (Startup metrics for pirates!) in order to measure the acquisition of new customers and the conversion funnel (?);
• reading about SEO, conversion funnels, Call-to-action & conversion techniques, leads and copywriting and other unfamiliar terms and methodologies

This alone seems to be challenging, as it involves a lot of preparation related to work that I am not familiar with; however, getting to learn about such things helps me broaden my (already broad) knowledge obtained through my work with Agro-Know (including metadata & their management, digital repositories, information management, knowledge organization systems, linked data, big data, social media, open access & open data, etc.).

Last but not least, I am working on two publications (one for the Open Repositories 2015 Conference and another for the Open Knowledge in Agricultural Development (OKAD)) to be submitted in the next days and doing some work for the text for the website of the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group of RDA (of which I am a member) and completed the Greek translation of the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources - a movement that I really endorse :-)

I have a feeling that February will be a key month for my work, as the deployment of this new Agro-Know product is expected and this will be affected in a high degree by my personal contribution. At the same time, my collaboration with my new team member is a stake that I need to win, as this will be a win-win situation for both sides; the team will gain a long-term new member and I will have more free time to focus on more high-level aspects of my work.

Seminar on social media, marketing and campaigns

I am the Marketing & Networks Manager of Agro-Know since June 2014; mostly due to my involvement in the social media in general but mostly blogging and tweeting. I am self-taught for both, I (hope that I) am good at it because I really like it and I always try to find ways to perform even better in using social media effectively. I often find myself downloading related e-books and watching presentations on optimizing the use and effectiveness of social media.

In this context, a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a face-to-face, 12-hour seminar on the use of social media (mostly at a corporate level) and marketing, focusing on the use of campaigns for promoting corporate events and activities in general. The seminar took place on two days (20 & 22/10/2014, 6 hours each), it was organized by Seminaria.gr and delivered by Arsenis Paschopoulos, e-Commerce & Internet Marketing Expert and Digital Marketing Manager of Just On Line with a long experience in social media and teaching this subject. The seminar took place in a cozy meeting room of Golden Age Hotel (Athens, Greece), pretty close to a metro station, making it really easily accessible.

A photo posted by Vassilis (@vprot) on Oct 10, 2014 at 8:24am PDT

The seminar was addressed to both novice and advanced users of social media (it was attended by about 15 people) and this was a tricky part, as the trainer needed to make sure that everyone would get the basics of the social media presented (novices) without having a part of the audience getting bored (the more advanced users). Considering myself a more advanced social media user than the average, I have to admit that not only I did not feel bored but I indeed learned things that I was not aware of regarding the social media that I am using. The social media covered by the seminar during the first day were the following:

1. Facebook and Google+ (I also consider them in the same league);
2. YouTube;
3. LinkedIn;
4. Twitter;
5. Pinterest (a pretty bizarre choice at first, but the use cases presented were convincing)

The time available for these was marginally sufficient but we more or less managed to cover everything, including information from creating an account and linking to other social media to using them for corporate purposes.

The second day was devoted to the use of campaigns using the aforementioned social media; Facebook was obviously the most well-covered medium but still alternative options for campaigns using the rest of the social media were presented. I realized that running a campaign using e.g. Facebook is not as expensive as I initially thought and it might be pretty effective, too.

My overall impression was rather positive; I managed to learn some things that I was not aware of, Mr. Paschopoulos helped me address some issues that I had with specific social media, I got to learn a lot of new stuff about the campaigns and got some basic information about SEO and the interpretation of analytics for each tool. He proved to be good at communication and had a deep knowledge of the social media presented.

Apart from the training, I also got to get a high number of slides presented during the seminar (but not limited to it - I got much more than that) as well as a book authored by Mr. Paschopoulos on Social Media Marketing (hardcopy) which contains a lot of useful information and can be used as a reference, documenting more or less what was already presented during the seminar.

My attendance to the seminar was another example of the training opportunities that Agro-Know offers to its team members; these are not limited to internal trainings but also include external opportunities as well.